Big Ben with its iconic gong has been giving time to Londoners since the 1850s. The hallmark of the clock has been not only it’s impressive façade, or it’s going, but also its accuracy.
Since a few days this fabled accuracy has come under a cloud. The clock started delaying by up to 6 seconds per hour. A very serious lapse indeed.
This baffled the engineers, who, after much detective work determined, that the falt lay with the current pennies. These pennies have traditionally been added, or removed from the pendulum to keep it balanced. However, when the British changed the system to decimal, the weight of pennies also changed.
This has resulted in the formula being convoluted, simply because the weight of pennies was not being accounted for.
The problem has since been rectified.
